Although Koo-Wee-Rup is a farming town that depends on the swamp being dry, people who live there often still call themselves ‘swampies’.

The culture of the swamp has developed from the European experience of draining the water and clearing the dense natural landscape.

The swamp culture embodies a deep connection between families that have lived there for many decades. It is a culture of shared experience, of frequent floods that would wash away the year’s crops and destroy precious belongings.

The 1934 floods remain the most vivid in local memory and like many before, were caused by the failure of the drainage system.

When Catani began work on the drainage system, things had not been going well. He turned the difficult project around by importing machinery such as the Leubecker Land Dredger to replace the toil of digging by hand.

Once the water had subsided and the thick tea tree was cleared, a railway was laid to allow access into places like Korrumburra. This enabled produce to be transported out of the swamp to Melbourne for sale.

This was a special branch of the Gippsland railway. Koo-Wee-Rup relied on the railway to export produce from its blossoming potato industry.